The EEOC Lost a Fifth of Its Staff. Its Own Budget Says It'll Close More Cases Anyway.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency a worker has to go through before they can sue over race, sex, disability, age, or religious discrimination on the job — it investigates the charge first, under Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA, and the Equal Pay Act.▸ In fiscal year 2025 it recovered almost $660 million for 17,680 victims of discrimination, including $528 million for 13,351 private-sector workers — the highest private-sector recovery in the agency's 60-year history. It did that with 2,027 full-time staff. For fiscal year 2026, the year now underway, Congress enacted a budget for a smaller agency still: $435.4 million and 1,803 FTE. The agency's own numbers say the caseload isn't shrinking to match.

The EEOC's total budget authority held flat at exactly $455.0 million for two straight years — FY2024 actual and FY2025 actual match to the dollar, confirmed independently in the agency's own FY2025 Agency Financial Report, which states plainly: "the EEOC received $455 million in budget authority" in fiscal year 2025.▸ For FY2026 — the budget year the agency is operating under right now — Congress enacted $435.4 million, a $19.6 million, 4.3% cut, per the FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification. The agency has asked for a partial rebound to $455.45 million in FY2027, which would still be Congress's decision to make, not a done deal.

The dollar cut and the staff cut track the same collapse.▸ The EEOC ran on 2,246 full-time positions in FY2024. By the end of FY2025 that had fallen to 2,027 — a drop the agency's own FY2025 Agency Financial Report attributes to the federal Deferred Resignation Program, retirements, and "a prolonged hiring freeze." That report separately warned, on a broader employee-headcount basis, that the agency began FY2025 with around 2,170 employees and projected the number would "drop below 1,700" during FY2026 — "almost a quarter" of the workforce. The enacted FY2026 FTE level that Congress actually funded, 1,803, confirms the direction if not the exact figure: 224 fewer full-time positions than FY2025, and 443 fewer than FY2024 — a 19.7% cut in two years. The FY2027 request asks to add back only 47 of them.

New charge receipts have been essentially flat — 88,531 in FY2024, 88,201 in FY2025, and the same 88,201 figure carried forward as the assumption for both FY2026 and FY2027.▸ Resolutions haven't been flat. They rose from 87,219 in FY2024 to 90,743 in FY2025, and the agency's own workload table — filed in the same document that cut FY2026 staff to 1,803 FTE — projects 93,468 resolutions in FY2026 and 100,005 in FY2027. That's a resolution target 10.2% higher than what the fuller FY2025 staff achieved, asked of a workforce that will be smaller in every one of those years than it was in FY2025, let alone FY2024. Nothing in the budget documents explains how; the agency's stated plan leans on "effective use of technology" and process changes to make up the difference, per the same financial report.

These figures measure charge volume and dollars recovered, not investigation depth — the budget documents do not report how thoroughly a given charge is investigated before it's closed, so a rising resolution count on a shrinking staff is not, on this data alone, evidence of either efficiency or corner-cutting.